untitled: gray paintings
In a work of art, according to the poet A.R. Ammons, “a world comes into being about which any statement, however revelatory, is a lessening.”
I first invoked this characterization when attempting to formulate an adequate response to a friend’s piercing and evocative poem. I paraphrased Ammons as he himself had echoed Lao-tse. “A poem becomes an existence about which nothing can be said in words worth saying,” Ammons advised.
Although I ascribed a prosaic title to these four works, I have come to regard each as a poem rather than a painting.
I have often compared my process of art making to the act of creating poetry. As with poetry, my work is a physical, visual means to a non-physical, non-verbal source. A poem often lends an order to its materials and aspires to transcend them as I have attempted here.. I have relied on my process of accretion and reduction, and of distillation, to aspire to the ineffable quality of a made thing. I worked on only these four pieces for over a year – often, in a day, either smothering or abrading what had taken me months to create.
I filled my studio with Gregorian chant. I hope that its mystery and composure is inherent in this work.
I listened to the hypnotic music of minimalist composers and I now see that pattern, pulse and reiteration reflected here as well.
My writing table is lined with books of poetry that I stopped to read when I exhausted myself with the physical work required to create these surfaces.
The act of writing a statement to accompany a body of work is always the last step in the process for me –a lessening- perhaps because it is so difficult to find the language for what I hope it already possesses.
Donna Mintz
Atlanta, Georgia
May 2011
